


Wish I May, Wish I Might

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, F/F, Rose as a thief, Terezi as a sniper-for-hire, two monsters in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-05
Updated: 2012-10-05
Packaged: 2017-11-15 16:41:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/529376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><b>Recognize</b>, <i>v.</i> to identify someone or something from a previous encounter. Synonyms: make (<i>informal</i>)</p><p> </p><p>
  <i>We didn't leave anyone alive to make us.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wish I May, Wish I Might

**Author's Note:**

> Title and opening quote are lyrics from the song Serial Killer by Lana Del Rey. Closing quote is lyrics from the song You and I from the band Paper Route. H.P. Lovecraft was an author and, some would say, mad prophet.

_Baby, I'm a sociopath,_  
 _Sweet serial killer._  
 _On the warpath_  
 _'Cause I love you_  
 _Just a little too much._

**=O=**

There's humming in Rose's ear, cheerful despite the static interference. She wishes Terezi would stop; it's ever-so-slightly off-key and the humming makes it hard for her to hear the night watchmen.

“I do not, actually, have to put up with your ludicrous bullshit.” 

The humming cuts off with a mad giggle. 

“Whatever you say, babe, you are so full of shit.” 

Slip forward, from one shadow to the next, trusting to the piercing red light of a security camera, timing the sweep in her head _1, 2, 3_. It's dancing Rose knows by heart, a kind of waltz the Venetians haven't even _heard_ of. 

“I don't. You know I don't.” 

“Yeah, yeah, but do you _want to?_ ” 

Rose grits her teeth and lays delicate fingertips on the door of the safe. Sometimes there aren't words to say that are the right ones, she's learned over years of careful exit strategies, and this has always been one of them. 

“Rosey, baby, you know you don't want to.” 

Lies, damned lies, and degenerate untruths.

“Silence, you horrendous bitch.” 

Terezi grins a horrible grin that says _got you_ like she thinks she maybe won something, Rose can hear it in the static silence down the comm line in her ear. 

“Aww, sweetness, you're making me blush!” 

“Someday I will murder you.” she promises, and wishes she were telling a lie. “Now shut up, are you aware safes don't open themselves?”

Terezi laughs and somewhere, in the hallways, there's the sound of a bullet breaking a window and a body hitting the floor.

**=O=**

Terezi makes up a story for each person that asks where they met, _we met on a beach, we were in Paris with other lovers, we were friends in high school_ but she ends each one with her frenzied laughter and _it just felt right_ which was maybe more truth than it was lie.

Rose knows that they met because of a job that, for reason's that didn't matter as much as the meeting itself, there needed to be a sniper on the outside and a thief on the inside. By the end the bodies were a bloody trail behind them and Rose thinks maybe Terezi's deranged smile should have bothered her more than it did. That her casual explanation, _I didn't want to leave anyone alive to make you_ , should have been a cautionary sign. 

She warned the murderer _“The only parts of your body that they will find are the ones I intend them to,”_ and the girl had had laughed and laughed, fearlessly. It should have warned Rose off. 

But it didn't. It doesn't.

**=O=**

Once upon a time Terezi takes a job she shouldn't have and trusts a man when she should have known better.

It ends suddenly, and it hurts a lot and she can taste blood on her lips that she thinks belongs to her. She might be wrong. There's a lot of blood but odds are, with how much of it is hers, the hemoglobin is familiar. 

It starts with a stutter and the skip of a record, and then sterile white. She opens her eyes and pulls out her IV in one motion. 

“I checked everything they put in it.” Rose says mildly from beside her. Terezi grins fiercely and feels stitches pull in her cheek. She probably looks like Frankenstein's monster and she can still taste old iron in her mouth, but the only pain is the old aches in her bones. 

“Couldn't stay away, Lalonde?” she asks. 

_You came in after me._

Rose inclines her head with the faintest shade of a monstrous smile. 

“Charming as always, Pyrope.” she sighs. 

_Of course I did._

“A dollar says there's no one left alive.” Terezi mutters out of the corner of her mouth, winking like a vaudevillian villain. There's an echo in the air, a throwaway line that means too much now, _no one left to make you._

Rose smiles and it looks frigid, looks fake, but that's really just Rose's way, Terezi knows. 

“I am a consummate professional.” she agrees serenely. “I would prefer that the situation not arise again.” 

_Don't be so careless,_ which is really only her way of saying _don't get hurt again_. 

“Course not, cupcake. Are they giving me the good stuff?”

**=O=**

Terezi met Rose first to hash out a job and she thought, mostly, that she had never seen a paler woman.

“It's a good thing I brought my stakes, vampire girl.” she had said jeeringly and Rose had smiled a horrific freakshow of a smile. It twisted something aching in Terezi's belly.

“The only parts of your body that they will find are the ones I intend them to.” She had replied and Terezi had thought that for the first time that she had met a animal of her mettle. On that job she could have sworn that her shots never missed, her reactions shaved down to the millisecond it took for a monster to fall in love. 

Rose brings out the poet in her.

**=O=**

Terezi isn't as surprised as she maybe, probably should be when Rose shadows her home, a pale shape in a taxi a few feet behind. She isn't trying to hide. She isn't trying at all.

She walks up the steps after Terezi with the dignity of a queen and there's a little spatter of blood on her shoe, she must have missed it when she was cleaning. Terezi grins her widest, her brightest, and conducts her into the tiny apartment with a snickering _come into my parlor, my dearest fly_. 

“Your references haven't improved.” Rose observes as she sails inside like a duchess. 

Terezi closes the door and throws every lock. They click into place, to keep the bad things out or to keep the worse ones _in_. 

Rose is reading the titles of her books when she turns, even the ones in braille, running a hand over the spines with their bumps like vertebrae. 

“Murder mysteries.” Rose notes. 

“Inspiration.” Terezi corrects with a grin. 

Rose takes down the one with the spine worn almost to smoothness and sits on her couch, primly, eyes closed as she opens it and runs her fingertips down the title page. She looks like she'll be there a while, or she has been when Terezi wasn't looking. 

It's become complicated somewhere between the death threats and the endearments, Terezi thinks dizzily, tangled up too tightly in hospital sheets. She's gotten caught in a maze that she mistook for a hallway and now she's running blind, so blind. 

_Screw this,_ Terezi thinks. It's not her job to sort out things on this end of the scope. 

She goes to make some tea.

**=O=**

Rose doesn't say a word but she thinks maybe, possibly Terezi doesn't mind the silence sometimes and the way she can't quite smile all the way right. Her expressions are Lovecraftian on the scale of subtle horrors.

Terezi is a mass-murderer in the most literal sense, she gets no room to judge. 

_Braille_ , she wonders sometimes, _a sniper reading with her eyes closed. There's irony in there somewhere._

Rose thinks she has never loved anyone in her life, much less a tiny Indonesian firecracker that has dropped a man at five hundred yards with scarcely a look. Rose lies. More importantly, Rose lies to herself. 

She could do worse, she thinks, than a monster with soft hands, reading murder mysteries in braille with a smile on her face, taunting the author _that's the most creative you could be?_

**=O=**

“You needed me around 'cause you never kill anyone if you can help it. Have to have someone around to clean up your shit.”

“Perhaps I don't wish to, have you considered that?” 

“That's a bullshit reason, it's obviously because you're an artist!” 

“...You flatter me.” 

“An artist's got to have someone willing to do the dirty work right, like an agent. That's me. Don't leave anyone alive unless you have to, you got me?” 

“I suppose there's merit to the idea.” 

“I didn't want to leave anyone alive to make you.” 

“To make _us_ , I think you mean.” 

“Yeah, that.”

**=O=**

Rose doesn't leave and Terezi doesn't say a word about it.

**=O=**

Mornings are quiet because neither of them feel alive without a cup of coffee. Mornings are grunts and the smell of the cigarette Rose smokes when she can't sleep, which is most nights. It's simpler that way, with sleep blurring the edges of Rose's smile until it could almost be human in worse lighting, with the spark-spitting gears of Terezi's thoughts muffled beneath somnolence.

Afternoons are are loud because Terezi wouldn't be caught dead without a joke on her lips and Rose simply _has_ to top every one. There's laughter sometimes, the happy kind, and sometimes it turns vicious and ends with laughter, the mocking kind. Rose smiles but no one would mistake it for kind, Terezi thinks. 

Sometimes work gets done, research through Rose's shuffling papers or target practice out the window, taking slingshot potshots at pigeons. 

“Your street is quite noisy.” Rose says once. Terezi throws the classified ads at her and she never misses. 

“Find us a place then, you pretty, pretty princess.” 

Three days later they move and Terezi doesn't comment on the fact that there's only one bedroom. 

They burn down their old apartment together. Arguing Pollock and Warhol and the artistic merits of pornography, splashing the gasoline over the walls, _Terezi you are a menace and your taste is an atrocity_.

**=O=**

“Climb in.” Terezi pats the bed beside her.

Rose is a ghost beside the bed with holes for eyes. Terezi refuses to be scared, has refused from the start. She knows she can win. 

“I'm not offering again.” She lies threateningly, shaking a finger. “Otherwise you can sleep on the floor!” There's a breath of laughter and then Rose slips under the blankets next to her, a jumble of angular bones and cold skin so white it glows. Terezi squirms back to fit the curve of her spine to Rose's chest. 

“You're incorrigible.” Comes the whisper in her ear, and Terezi sleeps just fine in the arms of a fellow felon. 

The next morning her bed is empty but there's no smell of cigarettes in the air. Terezi grins. She knows she can win.

**=O=**

For the first hour Terezi's sure.

And then sun starts tracking its way across the sky and Rose isn't there. Then she's simply optimistic and by afternoon tiredly hopeful and then the sun starts to set and she's just tired. It's too quiet now even though Rose never made much noise if she could help it at all. There's no point in joking if there's no one to listen, Terezi reasons. 

She makes breakfast for one and rests her feet on the second chair, because she's nothing if not thorough in her pretenses. She doesn't talk to herself because she didn't before. She doesn't turn on the television, because it's easier that way. 

She tries blaming herself and then she tries blaming Rose and then decides that there's no point in the exercise of blame if there's no one to scream at anymore. 

She makes herself tea when it gets dark and sits with a book in her lap, eyes shut, until the street lamps come on. 

The hands removing the book from her grip don't wake her.

**=O=**

Terezi wakes up in her own bed and the sheets smell faintly of nicotine. She smiles, just for a moment.

**=O=**

“Where were you?”

“I was contacted for a job. I apologize for the lack of warning, it was very rushed.” 

“Fuck you.” 

“What is your problem?” 

“You are un-fucking-believable, you know that? You can't just disappear like that!” 

“Where I go and what I do are none of your concern.” 

“Fuck you.”

**=O=**

Rose doesn't come back to the bed. There's to much history there already, too much tangled together between them under the sheets and she knows that she should cut her losses and run. She thinks that she can take the hit, that this is just another punch to roll with.

At night she chain-smokes on the open-air landing and Terezi doesn't say a word, just nudges over cups of coffee in the mornings. Rose didn't used to have the patience that Terezi does for stalking a target but in the dark, alone outside, she's been able to stare down the stars. 

Terezi doesn't say a word about the shadows under Rose's eyes but she does try in her own way to get her to sleep on the couch, _it's not just there to be a damn decoration, I promise_. Maybe, Rose thinks, she didn't fuck it up beyond repair. 

She doesn't leave.

**=O=**

Terezi passes up one job, then two. She makes excuses to refuse things to people she shouldn't, but that's nothing she isn't used to. Admitting to herself that she's staying to keep Rose from leaving is easier than doing the right thing, than letting go of the thing she loves.

“You have not had a job in a very long time.” Rose observes one day. It's the most they've said to each other in days. The first time they've done more than bump into each other gently while orbiting the same space, _good morning_ and _good night_ with nothing much in between.

“Nothing good's come up.” Terezi says, shrugging like it's casual. Rose doesn't reply and Terezi wonders if she knows. 

She takes the next job.

**=O=**

“I'm going to be in Argentina for a few days.”

“Ah.” 

“Yeah, so don't burn this place down or some ridiculous shit like that.” 

“It shall be in perfect condition when you return.” 

“Fabulous.” 

“...Be careful.” 

“Yeah, yeah.”

**=O=**

She jitters through the job even though it's easy, pretends her nerves are misgivings about the security around the target. For the first time in years she misses with her first shot and even though she puts the second precisely through the target's temple, the damage is done. She cleans up the mess with her trademark efficiency until there isn't a living soul on-site but her.

When she goes home she's more tired than the job warrants and there's a sick feeling in her chest that she refuses to contemplate. _Rose will be there_ , she tells herself, even though Rose didn't say she would, even though she didn't promise. 

She writes the apprehension turning her stomach over off as embarrassment over the job and opens the front door with her most fearless of smiles. 

The room is empty, which registers first, but what registers next is that while it's clean it's not cleaned out. An important distinction, the difference between a barren room and yet-to-be-cleaned dishes in the sink, laundry on the floor that isn't hers. 

Terezi releases a breath she's been holding for days.

**=O=**

Rose is sleeping in the bed and it smells faintly of cigarettes.

Terezi sets her bags on the floor outside the door and goes to make tea, giving Rose the chance to wake up. 

When she comes out of the room she's got her eldritch half-smile running full strength. 

“How was it?” she asks. 

“Fucking awful.” Terezi replies, and it's almost like it was before.

**=O=**

Rose spends the first night on the landing, smoking with the concentration of an addict, but the emptiness of the apartment behind her is pulling her back in. Before, it seemed like Terezi took up so much space that even asleep Rose couldn't breathe. Now she cant breathe because Terezi's absence is sucking out all the air. She thinks about leaving, about how easy it would be with no one to stop her, but then she imagines Terezi coming home to an empty apartment and wonders what she would think.

She doesn't leave. 

The day is easy because Terezi has a lot of books and a disturbingly wide variety of teas, and there's always errands to run and research to do. Rose doesn't do boredom and she refuses to be lonely. 

The next night she climbs into the bed because she really is very, very tired and the couch is cold. She doesn't think to much about how the sheets smell like Terezi because that would be counter-productive.

**=O=**

Terezi comes home and doesn't appear to notice how much tea is gone, doesn't comment on the mussed bed, and Rose might scream with how much she doesn't say.

But it doesn't feel like she can't breathe anymore so she doesn't say anything either, all day. They orbit the same space still and it seems easier now, less like an avoidance strategy. It's nice, it's easier than before, and even though Rose doesn't know what changed she doesn't want to mess it up. 

She opens the door in the evening with her pack of cigarettes in hand and Terezi stops in the bedroom doorway, leaning against the frame like a coolkid. 

“You're going to get cancer and die.” She's smiling and so Rose tries a smile back, feeling the familiar twist at the corners, knowing it doesn't ever sit right on her face. Terezi doesn't even blink. 

“I know.” she replies. Terezi snorts. 

“Come to bed when you're done.” She's turned and closed the door behind her before Rose can find something to say. She looks down at the cigarettes in her hand and doesn't want a single one.

**=O=**

It's dark in the bedroom, and Terezi is a tiny hump in miles of bed.

It's a moment of déjà vu, standing over the bed with no options without risk. Rose doesn't what she's supposed to do. There's too much to lose to do it wrong the first time. Rose is tired of it, tired of not knowing and tired of doing nothing about it. Very tired. 

“Climb in.” Terezi turns over, her eyes too shadowed to give anything away. She sounds exhausted, Rose thinks, and she begins to wonder if Terezi might not know what to do either. 

It's easy, all of a sudden, to remember her lines. 

“After all, I wouldn't want to sleep on the floor.” she murmurs and Terezi barks a laugh. It's cold when she slips under the covers until Terezi squirms back to tuck up against her. 

“Yeah, wouldn't want that, sweetcheeks.” Terezi mutters into the pillow, tone playfully ironic. 

It's not all the way better yet, Rose knows, but it's getting there.

**=O=**

_So run for your life now._  
 _Maybe you won't,_  
 _You wanna stay here,_  
 _Live underground._


End file.
